Two local teens prepare for world’s largest STEM project competition

Cindy Cheng, a Grade 11 student at Laurel Heights Secondary School in Waterloo, working on her project at a University of Waterloo lab. (Hannah Schmidt/CTV Kitchener)

Two teens from Waterloo Region will represent Canada at a prestigious youth Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) competition in the United States.

The Grade 9 and 11 students, from different high schools, will join their six teammates in Los Angeles in May. Their innovative projects will then go up against nearly 2,000 other students from countries around the world.

For Cindy Cheng, her passion for science started early.

“I was lucky to be born in a family that's very much involved in the sciences,” said the Grade 11 student from Laurel Heights Secondary School. “I really began to look into material sciences. I like how you can use chemistry to create these tangible, functional objects.”

Cheng also recently became interested a new field.

“I was first inspired to start this work in July of 2023, [after] I attended a symposium on medical micro bionics,” she explained. “When I saw the type of work that's being done and actually how close it seemed to being actually used to make robotics in the medical industry, I was really inspired and I saw some overlap with some work in material science that I had already done.”

When she was selected to represent Canada at the 2024 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), it was a dream come true.

“Especially representing Canada as a young woman in STEM, it makes me feel a little bit like I'm doing more than just talking about research and competing at a science fair.”

This will be Cheng’s third time participating at the competition. This year she’ll be showcasing an idea to advance stem cell research and delivery.

“I'm presenting a system of soft micro robots,” she said. “They are made of materials that are biocompatible and that mimic the natural areas where stem cells are found inside the body. So I developed this system, which I call the SMOR system, to try and create a more efficient method of delivering stem cells.”

The project impressed Cheng’s mentor.

“She came up with the idea she had already read the papers, collected the literature, and she had a kind of laser-focused vision on what she wants to do,” said Hamed Shahsavan, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Waterloo.

Also joining Team Canada is Grade 9 student Gurnoor Kaur.

“I've always been the kid to be curious, you know, the type of kid who is like, go and run around to ask questions. So I think, yeah, for most of my life I have been interested in science,” the student from Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute told CTV News.

Kaur will present her low-cost sensor for label-free detection of Malaria.

“One big issue in the world is Malaria,” she explained. “Malaria is the third largest killer of children under five. And it's not something that we talk [about] in Canada. However, just because it doesn't affect us, doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to find a solution to it. One issue lies within diagnosis because its labor intensive and it requires lot. I wanted to see if I could eliminate that need.”

Kaur started working on the project about a year ago.

“I designed this device, it's called Malascope,” she explained. “It uses the light scattering and the diffraction of light to diagnose Malaria. I also integrated this device with air to differentiate healthy Malaria cells, red blood cells that were infected with Malaria. This allowed me to achieve an accuracy of around 98 per cent.”

Shahsavan said opportunities, like this international competition, are fundamental in developing a young person’s mind. They introduce the student to more complex ways of thinking at an earlier age.

“Traditionally, I think STEM was taught to basically above high school students. But the psychology says… the brain is ready, from childhood, to absorb anything actually you put in front of them and I don't think you have to wait until you go to university to start working in STEM because many of the experiments we do don’t require sophisticated or complex concepts. As we may learn at the university level, you can actually be active in the lab and learn as you go.”

Together, these bright young minds aim to not only share their work, but also their commitment to advancing STEM education among young women.

“In the 10th grade, I was selected as an executive member of my school science club and there were 10 executives,” Cheng explained. “Nine of them were boys, and I was the only girl. So it took a lot of advocating for the selection of other girls in STEM, the recognition that, you know, gender doesn't really play a role in performance in STEM. Another wonderful thing about going to ISEF is that you get to meet people of all ethnicities, beliefs, genders and see that, you know, everybody's capable of producing this wonderful research.”

“Don't ever stop those questions about: ‘How does this work? Why does this work? What can we do to solve this problem?’” Kaur added. “Because that's the only way we can create change.”